Steve Quayle News Alerts

September 30, 2002

VIENNA, Austria (CNN) -- Iraqi and U.N. officials have completed the first day of talks aimed at putting in place logistics for the return of arms inspectors to Iraq.

The talks are the first test of Iraq's offer to resume cooperation with weapons inspectors, but U.S. and British diplomats are pressing for new ground rules for inspections.

Sources described the closed-door talks, held on Monday at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, as serious, businesslike and generally positive.

Iraqi officials presented U.N. officials with four years' worth of documentation on Iraqi "dual use" facilities, which have both military and civilian applications.

The talks, scheduled to continue on Tuesday, aim to establish "practical arrangements" for the return of inspectors after a four-year absence.

Those include entry into Iraq, accommodations and a headquarters for inspection teams, as well as ensuring the inspectors' security and their freedom of movement.

"We want to ensure that if and when inspections come about, we will not have clashes inside," said Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).

"We would rather go through these things outside in advance, and we've even said that we will not deploy inspectors to Iraq until we have had talks about these things."

Blix said he would report to the Security Council on Thursday. Iraq denies U.S. and British accusations that it has weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. resolutions.

Iraqi officials offered to allow weapons inspectors to return without condition on Sept. 16 amid U.S. and British threats of military action to enforce U.N. resolutions requiring Baghdad to disarm.

U.S. officials have greeted the offer with scepticism. "Their words change, their actions do not," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Monday.

The Vienna talks came as the United States and Britain were urging the Security Council to approve a new mandate for inspectors -- one that requires Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to give inspectors unfettered access within seven days, with the threat of force behind it.

President George W. Bush has warned that Washington would move to oust Saddam on its own if the United Nations fails to act.

Russia, France and China, which could veto a resolution, have expressed reservations about the U.S.-British proposal.

And several European Union foreign ministers have dismissed U.S. calls for a "regime change" in Baghdad, stressing the United Nations must be the driving force behind efforts to disarm Iraq.

An Iraqi source told CNN that Baghdad hopes the Security Council will adopt a new "compromise" resolution and hopes that Iraq will be able to cooperate with it.

In Turkey, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said that U.S. threats to topple President Saddam Hussein were a danger for the whole region.

At the United Nations, Chinese Ambassador Wang Yingfan said Bejing favoured a political settlement "through the U.N. framework."

Wang endorsed the French idea of a two-step process, which would call for the return of inspectors in one Security Council resolution and a second spelling out the consequences if Iraq failed to comply.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin said inspectors should return to Iraq "as soon as possible."

"All questions around Iraq should be not only discussed (but) resolved by diplomatic means through the United Nations Security Council," he said.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Monday he expects the Security Council to "work this out and come up with an acceptable resolution."

The United States and Britain have not yet submitted their draft resolution to the Security Council, he said, but details of the proposal have been emerging since last week.

Diplomats said the U.S.-British resolution would allow any member of the permanent five Security Council nations to participate in weapons inspections in Iraq and that armed guards would protect inspectors -- but not in "coercive inspections, to kick down doors," one diplomat said.

In Baghdad, an Iraqi parliamentary official repeated Iraq's longstanding demands that any inspections must respect Iraq's sovereignty, security and dignity -- demands that have undercut previous inspection efforts.

And Iraqi officials were said to be briefing Blix on a proposed piece of legislation in the Iraqi parliament that would formally renounce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The Iraqi team in Vienna includes Gen. Amr al-Sadi, an adviser on scientific and technical affairs; Hasam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate; and Saeed Hasan, a Foreign Ministry official who was Baghdad's former U.N. ambassador.

Harvard University analyst Graham Allison said: "We are seeing the most intense bargaining among big states that we have seen since the end of the Cold War, with war in the offing and no certainty about the outcome.

"There is going to be lots of twists and turns here, and I think both the U.S. and Iraq will end up making some compromises accommodations, as we get towards endgame."

-- CNN correspondents Christiane Amanpour and Jane Arraf and producer Ronni Berke contributed to this report

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/09/30/vienna.iraq/index.html